"Thatch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... creeping insidiously up each side of my head. It is executing flank movements from the temples northward, and some day the two columns will meet and after that I'll be considerably more of a highbrow than I am now. At present I am craftily combing the remaining thatch in the middle and smoothing it out nice and flat, so as to keep those bare spots covered—thinly perhaps, but nevertheless covered. It is my earnest desire to continue to keep them covered. I am not a professional ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... was that," said Bunting slowly. "Regular right-down queer. Leetle touched, you know, under the thatch," and, as he tapped his head significantly, both young people ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... where he had heard of cottagers' hoards being found: the thatch, the bed, and a hole in the floor. His eyes travelling eagerly over the floor, noted a spot where the sand ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... purpose was to reach the house of Little Black Fox, and this he came to at last. It was a large building; next to the Mission and Agency it was by far the largest house on the Reservation. It was built of logs and thatch and plaster, and backed into a thick clump of shady maple trees. The son was more lavish than the father. Big Wolf had always been content to live in a tepee. He was an older type of chief. The son moved with the times and ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... all view of the valley from their gaze, the last thing they noticed was their hut, the home of so many long and weary months, blazing away in regular bonfire fashion. Master Eric had put a match to the thatch of the little edifice on crossing its ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... that night as clearly as if it were yesterday. We sat in front of the fire with the bedding and the mattresses airing behind us until late into the night. The rain got worse too. There was a hole in the thatch overhead, and through it I saw the lightning slash the sky, as I lay in bed. Very few people ever came up or down that valley; and the next morning, after the storm, the chamois were close about the inn, on the grass. We went on together. That ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... As a lark drops its nest among the grasses, so a few peasant people had dropped their little farms and cottages amid the great green woods on the winding river. It was a pretty place, with one steep, stony street, shady with poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose thatch a cloud of white and gray pigeons fluttered all day long; a little aged chapel with a conical red roof; and great barns covered with ivy and thick creepers, red and purple, and lichens that were yellow in the sun. All around ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... necessitated therunto. This fire was occasioned by some of y^e sea-men that were roystering in a house wher it first begane, makeing a great fire in very could weather, which broke out of y^e chimney into y^e thatch, and burnte downe 3. or 4. houses, and consumed all y^e goods & provissions in y^m. The house in which it begane was right against their store-house, which they had much adoe to save, in which were their co[m]one store & all their ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... hundred thriving agricultural villages. Every foot of land which can be seen from the railroad is cultivated by the most careful spade husbandry, and much of it is irrigated for rice. Streams abound, and villages of grey wooden houses with grey thatch, and grey temples with strangely curved roofs, are scattered thickly over the landscape. It is all homelike, liveable, and pretty, the country of an industrious people, for not a weed is to be seen, but no very striking features or peculiarities arrest one at first ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Cacahuamilpan on the slope of a hill. In the midst of neat trim gardens stood the little white church, and the ranches of the inhabitants, cottages of one room, with walls of canes which one can see through in all directions, and roofs of thatch, with the ground smoothed and trodden hard for a floor. Everything seemed clean and prosperous, and there was a bright sunny look about the whole place; but to Englishmen, accustomed to the innumerable appliances of civilized life, it seems ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... rustic taste, with rudely-arched virandahs, formed of limbs and trunks of trees, intermixed with evergreens, and reminding us of the "gnarled oaks and soft myrtles" of the poet's fancy; and with trimmed arches of thatch over little ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... sympathies. Of this there cannot be a doubt, however: the chiefs would not have had the land at all, could the clansmen have foreseen the present state of the Highlands—their children in mournful groups going into exile—the faggot of legal myrmidons in the thatch of the feal cabin—the hearths of their loves and their lives the green sheep-walks ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... like thousands of others in England and Scotland, with a thatched roof, on which grass and weeds have intruded a picturesque, though alien growth. There is a door and one window in front, besides another little window that peeps out among the thatch. Close by the cottage, and extending back at right angles from it, so as to inclose the farm-yard, are two other buildings of the same size, shape, and general appearance as the house: any one of the three ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his supreme delight to wander down the little valley to Jutigny, a village planted at the foot of the hills, a tiny heap of cottages capped with thatch strewn with tufts of sengreen and clumps of moss. In the open fields, under the shadow of high ricks, he would lie, listening to the hollow splashing of the mills and inhaling the fresh breeze from Voulzie. Sometimes he went as far as the peat-bogs, to the green ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... then entered the house, which covered a piece of ground 327 feet long, and forty-two feet broad. It consisted of a roof, thatched with palm leaves, and raised upon thirty-nine pillars on each side, and fourteen in the middle. The ridge of the thatch, on the inside, was thirty feet high, and the sides of the house, to the edge of the roof, were twelve feet high; all below the roof being open. As soon as we entered the house, she made us sit down, and then calling four young girls, she assisted them to take off my shoes, draw down my stockings, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... the present time, the growth is restricted to the supply required by the Arabs for the manufacture of their cloths. These are woven by themselves, the weaver sitting in a hole excavated in the ground before his rude loom, shaded by a rough thatch about ten feet square, supported upon poles. There is a uniformity in dress throughout all the Nubian tribes of Arabs, the simple toga of the Romans this is worn in many ways, as occasion may suggest, very similar to the Scotch ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... discharge of bullets; if we dismounted from our horses to take our hurried and scanty meal, we found some of them shot at the inn-door; if we flung ourselves, as tired as hounds after a chase, on the straw of a village stable, the probability was that we were awakened by finding the thatch in a blaze. How often we envied the easier life of the battalions! But there an enemy, more fearful than the peasantry, began to show itself. The weather had changed to storms of rain and bitter wind; the plains of Champagne, never famed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... appeared next, and began to look suspiciously about him. His fellow had rolled over in his death-struggles, and so might have been slain from my window in the house-front. Curls of smoke were coming up from under the thatch by now; and Ford, making up his mind, ran out with the others, and flung ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... distributed in no recognizable system, from twelve to twenty feet in diameter and from two to four in depth. They were excavated in the chalky soil, and from each a small drainage channel ran for a yard or two down the gentle slope on which the settlement stood. Obviously a superstructure of thatch and wattle would convert these pits into quite passable wigwams, corresponding to the description of Pytheas. This whole village was covered by several feet of top-soil in which were found numerous interments of Anglo-Saxon date. It had seemingly perished by fire, ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... but a very small place indeed, now-a-days,—yet it possesses a church, grey and ancient, whose massive Norman tower looks down upon gable and chimney, upon roof of thatch and roof of tile, like some benignant giant keeping watch above them all. Near-by, of course, is the inn, a great, rambling, comfortable place, with time-worn settles beside the door, and with a mighty sign a-swinging before it, upon which, plainly to be seen (when the sun catches ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... arms so she could see the openings herself—"and then I got in over my boots trying to plug the holes in the sluiceway with some plank." He was looking down into her eyes now. Never had he seen her so pretty. The exercise had made roses of her cheeks, and the up-turned face framed by the thatch of a bonnet bound with the veil, ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... injury; but at times they appear to be utterly reckless, and build in some place where there seems to us to be every probability that the nests will be disturbed. The little wren, for instance, usually builds its nest in some hole in an ivy-covered tree or in a thatch. When it builds in a more open place, it is careful to cover its nest with a dome or roof, leaving a hole in the side for its own passage in and out. It covers its nest on the outer side with green moss or brown leaves, selecting those materials which ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... that object, and he allowed them to travel languidly upwards and along the roof until they rested on the spot directly over his head, where they became fixed, and, at the same time, opened out to a glare, compared to which all his previous glaring was as nothing—for there, in the thatch, looking down upon him, was the angular head of a huge python. The snake was rolled up in a tight coil, and had evidently spent the night within a yard of the professor's head! Being unable to make out what sort of snake it was, and fearing that it might be a poisonous one, he crept quietly from ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... construction. It was as if the proud people of this remote, mountain world, wishing to owe their all to their own country, nothing to outsiders, had preferred to make their houses with their own hands out of their own rocks, hewing the walls and roofing them with thatch from grass grown in their ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the Hervey Islanders (p. 17 of notes): "The state is conceived of as a long house standing east and west, chiefs from the north and south sides of the island representing left and right; under chiefs the rafters; individuals the leaves of the thatch. These are the counterpart of the actual house (of the gods) in the spirit ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... to face with a type of man I had never before met. The enemy was astonishingly large and lithe and distinctly resembled one of the big gold-colored lions that live in the wilds of the Harpeth Mountains out beyond Paradise Ridge. His head, with its tawny thatch that ought to have waved majestically but which was sleek and decorous to the point of worldliness, was poised on his neck and shoulders with a singularly strong line that showed through a silk soft collar, held together by an exquisitely worldly amethyst silk scarf which, it was a shock to see, ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... actinidia and the akebia, both from Japan. They are perfectly hardy, and are rapid growers. The former has large thick glossy leaves, not affected by insects or disease, growing thickly along the stem and branches, making a perfect thatch. It blooms in June. The flowers, which are white with a purple center, are borne in clusters, followed by round or longish edible fruits. The akebia has very neat-cut foliage, quaint purple flowers, and often ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... room, moderately clean, furnished only with a table and two chairs. There were other rooms leading off it, but the stone partitions did not reach as high as the thatch and I could hear rustling, and some one snoring. I sat on one of the chairs at his invitation, and rather hoped for supper, having had none. But supper was not in his mind; it seemed he had too much else to worry him. He looked like a man who worried easily, and likely ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... was a small and almost valueless leasehold from the estate of General Johnstone. The house had always been tumbledown, and the tenancy of Bridget and her brood had not improved it externally. The lease was evidently a repairing one. For holes in the thatch roof were stopped with heather, or mended with broad slabs of turf held down with stones and laboriously strengthened with wattle—a marvel of a roof. It is certain that Boyd's efforts were never continuous. He tired of everything in an hour, or sooner—unless somebody, ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... was almost impossible to think of him as a matured man. The receding chin, and coarse, loosely opened mouth, the pale, lifeless eyes set too closely together under a low forehead, with a ragged thatch of dead, mouse-colored hair, and a furtive, sneaking, lost-dog expression, proclaimed him the outcast ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... sodden water, A drench for sur-rein'd jades, their barley-broth, Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat? And shall our quick blood, spirited with wine, Seem frosty? O, for honour of our land, Let us not hang like roping icicles Upon our houses' thatch, whiles a more frosty people Sweat drops of gallant youth in our rich fields! Poor we may call ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... a fagot-maker had occupied two years before. It was some distance up in the hills to the west. Since the scourge of war had passed over Palestine, there were scores of such hovels, vacant and abandoned to the bats and the small wild life about the countryside, and the boy doubted seriously if the thatch that covered it were still whole. But he attracted the attention of a pair of robust young Galileans on the way to the Passover, and, by their help, carried the wounded man to shelter in this hut. Urge, the sheep-dog, ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... had but mony, Or any friend to bring me from this bondage, I would Thresh, set up a Cobler's shop, keep Hogs, And feed with 'em, sell Tinder-boxes, And Knights of Ginger-bread, Thatch for three Half pence a day, and think it Lordly, From this base Stallion trade: why does he eye me, Eye ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (1 of 10) - The Custom of the Country • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... royal mount, which afterwards became famous as the site on which the church of St. Andrews was founded, and as giving to that place the name of Kilrimont.[28] The earliest Celtic church at St. Andrews was probably, like that of Iona, constructed with wattles and turf and roofed with thatch. It was customary to have caves or places of retirement for the hermits; they were used, too, as oratories or places of penance, and one such there is at St. Andrews, known as ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... up, And teach her yet more charming words and skill Than ever C[oe]lia, Chloris, Astrophil, Or any of the threadbare names inspir'd Poor rhyming lovers with a mistress fir'd. Come then! and while the slow icicle hangs At the stiff thatch, and Winter's frosty pangs Benumb the year, blithe—as of old—let us 'Midst noise and war of peace and mirth discuss. This portion thou wert born for: why should we Vex at the time's ridiculous misery? An age that thus hath fool'd itself, and will —Spite ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... house were on fire, but I knew from the position of the blaze (which was only a few hundred yards from where I stood), that there was no house there, or any combustible that would burn, and what perplexed me most was to see pieces of burning thatch and timber sparks fall hissing into the water at my feet. When the fire seemed at its height the firing appeared to weaken, and when the clear sound of a bugle floated out on the midnight air, it suddenly ceased, and I could hear distinctly the sound of cavalry coming ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... Ireland's westward welkin. Full she drad that God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins. Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... blanket in a treeless hollow in the midst of trees. The ground had been cleared by no human hand; it was a little basin of barren clay, burnt to a brick, and drained by the tiny water-hole that sparkled through its thatch of leaves and branches in the centre of a natural circle. Vanheimert lay on the eastern circumference; it was the sun falling sheer on his upturned face that cut short his sleep of deep exhaustion. The sky was a dark and limpid blue; but every leaf within Vanheimert's ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... a visit to Braden Medworth—the coincidence was too striking to be neglected. But first Barthorpe itself—a quaint old-world little market-town, in which some of even the principal houses still wore roofs of thatch, and wherein the old custom of ringing the curfew bell was kept up. He found an old-fashioned hotel in the marketplace, under the shadow of the parish church, and in its oak-panelled dining-room, hung about with portraits of masters of foxhounds and ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... exact sense, was Nikky, but tall and straight, with a thatch of bright hair not unlike that of the Crown Prince, and as unruly. Tall and straight, and occasionally truculent, with a narrow rapier scar on his left cheek to tell the story of wild student days, and with two clear young eyes that had looked out humorously at the world until lately. But ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... straight up, and then flew round and round, high up. I didn't know whether to watch the duck or enjoy looking at the village scene opposite, for it was at once delightfully new and delightfully familiar. There were mud-built cottages among feathery-foliaged trees with wide roofs of thatch of a silver grey colour, and above them were two or three palms against the sky. Biblical looking ladies went to and fro between lake and village, and each carried on her head a large, black, earthenware bowl steadied by one hand, and a smaller brass pot ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... buildings being, with the exception mentioned, constructed of large blocks of stone so perfectly worked that the joints of the masonry were scarcely perceptible, but without ornament or adornment of any kind whatever, and roughly roofed with thatch. The exception was in the case of the temple, which, like so many in ancient Peru, was dedicated to the Sun. This structure was erected upon the summit of a low mound, scarcely important enough in height to be termed a hill, yet high enough to allow the building to dominate all the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... But—Ned Hall, there ought to be a water-furrow across this land: it's a nasty, stiff, clayey, dauby bit of ground, and thou and I must fall to, come next Monday—I beg your pardon, cousin Manning—and there's old Jem's cottage wants a bit of thatch; you can do that job tomorrow while I am busy.' Then, suddenly changing the tone of his deep bass voice to an odd suggestion of chapels and preachers, he added. 'Now, I will give out the psalm, "Come all harmonious tongues", to be sung ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... moss the flower-plots Were thickly crusted, one and all; The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the peach to the garden wall. The broken sheds look'd sad and strange— Uplifted was the clinking latch, Weeded and worn the ancient thatch, Upon the lonely moated grange. She only said, "My life is dreary— He cometh not," she said; She said, "I am aweary, weary, I would ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... last, at last, the cool, washing throb of the great sea of bliss, whose fountain is the heart of God, had stolen upon her consciousness, and she knew that she lived. She lay in a neat little curtained bed, in a room with a sloping roof on both sides, covered, not with tiles or slates, but with warm thatch, thick and sound. Ivy was creeping through the chinks of the ill-fitting window-frame; but through the little dormer window itself the sun shone freely, and made shadows of shivering ivy-leaves upon the deal floor. ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... went on board, the servant of the inn following with a great hamper of wine and provisions. He was glad to see that a bright fire burned on an earthen hearth in the middle of the boat; the smoke finding its way out, partly through a hole cut in the thatch above it, partly by the opening at the fore end of the boat. He brought with him his horse cloth as well as his other belongings. The men, who were clearly in a hurry to be away, pushed the boat off from the shore as soon as ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... loitered hand in hand, a gay party of children and young people were assembled. The cottage had been purchased by an opulent and retired manufacturer. He had raised the low thatched roof another story high—and blue slate had replaced the thatch—and the pretty verandahs overgrown with creepers had been taken down because Mrs. Hobbs thought they gave the rooms a dull look; and the little rustic doorway had been replaced by four Ionic pillars in stucco; and a new dining-room, twenty-two feet by eighteen, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... your proneness to domestication, For he dwells in man's barn, and I build in man's thatch, As we say to each other—but, to our vexation, O'er your safety alone man ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the latch, And rarely smells the new-mown hay, And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch Twice or thrice his roundelay, Twice or thrice his roundelay; Alone and warming his five wits, The white owl in the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... were tallest, a little spring bubbled out of the ground, at the rate, I suppose, of a pint of water in a minute. The ferns grew immensely thick there; but someone had thinned out a few of the roots from the ground, leaving the uprooted plant with the ferns still living, to form a rough kind of thatch above a piece of earth big enough for a man's body. In the scented shade of this thatch, with the side of his face turned towards me, a big, rough, bearded man sat, filing away some bright steel irons which were riveted ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... thatch, Shall twitter near her clay-built nest; Oft shall the pilgrim lift the latch, And share my meal, ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... a mile had they marched, when at length the village of Plymouth Woke from its sleep, and arose, intent on its manifold labors. Sweet was the air and soft; and slowly the smoke from the chimneys Rose over roofs of thatch, and pointed steadily eastward; Men came forth from the doors, and paused and talked of the weather, 500 Said that the wind had changed, and was blowing fair for the Mayflower; Talked of their Captain's ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... them in full moonshine—but not just yet; and she crouched close to the straw thatch which stretched over the huge clay water-jars placed here for the slave-girls to get drink from. It cast a dark triangular shadow on the dusty ground that gleamed in the moonlight, and thus screened her from the gaze of the girls, while she could hear and see what ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was no more frost that winter. A fortnight passed before the place looked itself again, and even then congealed snow stood doggedly in the streets, while the country roads were like newly ploughed fields after rain. The heat from large fires soon penetrated through roofs of slate and thatch; and it was quite a common thing for a man to be flattened to the ground by a slithering of snow from above just as he opened his door. But it had seldom more than ten feet to fall. Most interesting ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... the back kitchen sloped down quite low. It was made of thatch and it had moss on it, and house-leeks and stonecrop and wallflowers, and even a clump of purple flag-flowers, at ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... wet would it be at certain seasons, that I was obliged to cover all within the pale with long poles, in the form of rafters, leaning against the rock, and loaded them with flags and large leaves of trees, resembling a thatch. ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... man replied. "You don't suppose they would be such fools as that and, if they had, you don't suppose as I should be such a fool to split on 'em. Not likely. I ain't no desire to wake up, one night, and find the door fastened outside and the thatch on fire." ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... look on all sides. Nothing is stirring in the sultry, penetrating heat; the palmetto thatch of clustering huts away beyond the opposite bank might contain no life for all of it they show. Hardly a bird twittering in the reeds but does so half heartedly. The man's face softens again, taking on the expression ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... however, had been treated by the builders so that they had a hard glaze, to prevent the wings and feet of the butterflies from sticking when they touched the walls. The roof was a woven affair, very cunningly made so that the top surface was a sort of thatch of flower-stems, while the ceiling was a solid sheet of flowers. Of course, in this climate, they were always fresh. The butterflies had their beds on the ceiling; indeed, as Sara arrived rather early, a few roistering ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... being white-washed. The little retreat is most delightful, and I am sure you and Lady Beaumont would be highly pleased with it. Coleridge has never seen it. What a happiness would it be to us to see him there, and entertain you all next Summer in our homely way under its shady thatch. I will copy a dwarf inscription which I wrote for it the other day, before the building was entirely finished, which indeed it is ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... courtier entered almost eagerly, his dark eyes shining under the thatch of eyebrows and the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Tilery.*—Such a tilery as is described above should have a drying shed from 60 to 80 feet long, and from 12 to 18 feet wide. This shed may be built in the cheapest and roughest manner, the roof being covered with felting, thatch, or hemlock boards, as economy may suggest. It should have a tier of drying shelves, (made of slats rather than of boards,) running the whole length of each side. A narrow, wooden tram-way, down the middle, to carry a car, by which the ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... by the steamers to Calcutta. The danger of an unexpected rise in the river is always provided for, and every village possesses two or more large boats, which are carefully protected from the sun by a roof of mats or thatch, to be in ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... artistic beauty. Sometimes the shrine consists only of a rude altar, situated amid a grove of trees; but, even in the case of large temples with a complete group of buildings, the architecture is extremely plain, the material employed being unornamented white wood with a thatch of chamaecyparis. The entrance to the temple grounds is always through gateways, called Torii; these are made sometimes of stone, but more properly of wood, and consist of two unpainted tree-trunks, with another on the top and a horizontal beam beneath. Near the entrance are commonly ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... Peter between his teeth, 'it's clear that I'm to have no butter to-day. Let's attend to the cow; it's too late to take her out to pasture, but there's a fine lot of hay on the house-thatch that hasn't been cut, and so she'll lose nothing by staying at home.' To get the cow out of the stable and to put her on the house-roof was no great trouble, for the dwelling was set in a hollow in the hill-side, so that the thatch was almost on a ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... extemporaneous lanai such as is used to shelter that al fresco entertainment, the luau. But in the old times of strict tabu and rigorous etiquette, when the chief had but to lift his hand and the entire population of a district ransacked plain, valley, and mountain to collect the poles, beams, thatch, and cordstuff; when the workers were so numerous that the structure grew and took shape in a day, we may well believe that ambitious and punctilious patrons of the hula, such as La'a, Liloa, or Lono-i-ka-makahiki, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... some stores, and returning, late in the evening, too tired to put away my packages, had retired to rest at once. My little maid, who was not so fatigued as I was, and slept more lightly, woke me in the night to listen to a noise in the thatch, at the further end of the store; but I was so accustomed to hear the half-starved mules of Cruces munching my thatch, that I listened lazily for a few minutes, and then went unsuspiciously into another heavy sleep. I do not know how long ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... came of the great storm in the spring of '97, the year that we had two great storms. This was the first one, and I remember it very well, because I found in the morning that it had lifted the thatch of my pigsty into the widow's garden as clean as a boy's kite. When I looked over the hedge, widow—Tom Lamport's widow that was—was prodding for her nasturtiums with a daisy-grubber. After I had watched her for a little ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... there were trees, and among them horses tethered and a fire strewing smoke on the air close beside. Between this little wood and the tarn itself there stood a low house of thatch with smoke also rising from it, and from the other fire among the trees came a sheen of steel caps and ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... wall was raised, as perpendicular as was found practicable, towards these overhang-wattles, this wall being roughly "pointed" with sand and clay and lime. Now into and upon the roof was woven and intertwisted a covering of thatch, that defied all winds and weathers, and that made the cottage marvelously cozy,—being renewed year by year, and never allowed to remain in disrepair at any season. But the beauty of the construction was and is its durability, or rather the ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... to take up our quarters. The building was enclosed on three sides by a rough stone wall, and by a wooden fence, forming a paddock of about three quarters of an acre in extent. It comprised one large room, of some forty feet by eighteen, which had a roof of thatch in tolerable repair. The north side, protected by a verandah, had a door and two windows, in which a few panes of glass remained, and looked upon the broad river, from which it was separated by a bank of some twenty feet in descent, covered with a variety ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... more than a foot in length, and the flaming strands radiated in all directions from an isolated and central spire which shot out straight toward the sky. I knew what to do with his tatters, but that crimson thatch dumfounded me. However there was no going back now, so I set to work upon him. Luckily my wardrobe represented three generations of O'Ruddy clothes, and there was a great plenty. I put my impostor in ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... she said. "What a fool I've been, Minnie, and how clever you are under that red thatch of yours! Dicky can not appear as long as I am here, and Pierce takes his place, and I help to keep the secret and to play the game! Well, I can appreciate a joke on myself as well as most people, but—Minnie, Minnie, think of that guilty ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a rawboned man with a thatch of thick black hair and small watery eyes. He was dressed, oddly enough, in a pair of tight-fitting trousers of white lawn, a flaming red tunic and a ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... were thy muse stark dead, should raise her up, And teach her yet more charming words and skill, Than ever Coelia, Chloris, Astrophil, Or any of the threadbare names inspired Poor rhyming lovers, with a mistress fired. Come, then, and while the snow-icicle hangs At the stiff thatch, and winter's frosty fangs Benumb the year, blithe as of old, let us, 'Midst noise and war, of peace and mirth discuss. This portion thou wert born for: why should we Vex at the times' ridiculous misery? An age that thus hath fooled itself, and will, Spite of thy teeth and mine, persist ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... side we had just ascended, the plateau was entirely surrounded by high mountains. The hut, which was built of planks and covered with thatch, appeared very cleanly kept. Behind it extended a small kitchen garden, in which fennel, the indispensable condiment in Aztec cookery, grew in great abundance; in front, there was a large tobacco plantation, ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... who had neglected to thatch his cottage, was one day asked by a gentleman with whom he was conversing, "Did it rain yesterday?" Instead of making a direct and candid reply, he sought to hide his fault, which he supposed had been ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... are to 'be good.' But if I sign that petition, although here in Dublin, the thing would be known at Tralee, 200 miles away, before I reached home—and a hundred to one that the first blackguard that passed would put a match in my thatch, would burn my stacks, would hough or mutilate my cattle." The speaker was a Roman Catholic farmer from Kerry. Mr. Morley, in stating that the prosecution of the Rev. Robert Eager had ceased and determined, was utterly wrong. The rector's cousin, Mr. W.J. Eager, also of Tralee, told ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... through huts of turf—among them one or two of clay, and one or two of stone, which were more like cottages. Hardly one had a window two feet square, and many of their windows had no glass. In almost all of them the only chimney was little more than a hole in the middle of the thatch. This rendered the absence of glass in the windows not so objectionable; for, left without ordered path to its outlet, the smoke preferred a circuitous route, and lingered by the way, filling the air. Peat-smoke, however, is both wholesome and pleasant, nor was there mingled with it any disagreeable ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... Vidrik Verlandson, Strike me not cruelly dead! And I will lead thee straight to my house, That's thatch'd ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... a girl if they would be thatching the house that autumn; but she answered that the thatch would last out the old people, and she was going to ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... way we came, and then knew that we could in no way take the boat to Poole. The gale was raging at its highest, and thatch was flying from the exposed roofs. It would be dead against us; and the sea was white with foam, even in the haven. So we must go by road, and that was a long way. But we must get back to Odda, for he should be in Wareham before the ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... consider, that by the inuasion of the Danes, the churches and monasteries throughout Northumberland were so wasted and ruinated, that a man could scarselie find a church standing in all that countrie, as for those that remained, they were couered with broome or thatch: but as for any abbey or monasterie, not one was left in all the countrie, neither did any man (for the space of two hundred yeares) take care for the repairing or building vp of any thing in decaie, so that the people of that countrie wist not what a moonke ment, and if they ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (1 of 12) - William the Conqueror • Raphael Holinshed
... six inches high, and broad in proportion. His great arms hung down until the monstrous hands almost touched the knees. His skin was quite dark, almost negroid; and a thick, close mat of curly black hair covered his huge head like a thatch. His face was muscular, ligamentous; with great bars, ridges and whelks of flesh, especially about the jaws and on the forehead. But the eyes fascinated me. They were the eyes of a wild beast, deep-set, sullen and glaring; they seemed to shine like those of the cat-tribe, with ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... gazing on his face, hoping yet to catch some sign of life, when innumerable larks alighted, singing, on the thatch of his cell,[27] as if to salute the soul which had just taken flight and give the Little Poor Man the canonization of which he was most worthy, the only one, doubtless, which he would ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... long low cottage with a hipped roof of thatch, having dormer windows breaking up into the eaves, a chimney standing in the middle of the ridge and another at each end. The window-shutters were not yet closed, and the fire- and candle-light within radiated forth upon the thick bushes of box and laurestinus growing in clumps ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... morning, Christy Mahon. Wait till you lay eyes on her leaky thatch is growing more pasture for her buck goat than her square of fields, and she without a tramp itself to keep in order ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... less unsuccessful than they were laborious. Under wretched covers of thatch lay our provisions and stores, exposed to destruction from every flash of lightning, and every spark of fire. A few of the convicts had got into huts; but almost all the officers, and the whole of the ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... drive them into the ground. They should have a point on one end and a fork on the other. Lay a stout pole across the two forks like a gypsy fire rig. Then lean poles against the crosspiece and finally thatch the roof with spruce, hemlock or other boughs and pile up boughs for the sides. A brush camp is only a makeshift arrangement and is never weather proof. It is simply a temporary shelter which with the all-night fire burning in front will ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... and often, lying on a hill-side and gazing at the gray tower of the church; sometimes coming into the village clustered round that same church, and looking at the old timber and plaster houses, the same, except that the thatch had probably been often renewed, that they used to be in his ancestor's days. In those old cottages still dwelt the families, the ———s, the Prices, the Hopnorts, the Copleys, that had dwelt there when America was a scattered ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and serving as the abode of the pastor, Dominie Megapolensis, known in our day as the writer of an interesting, though short, account of the Mohawks. Some twenty-five or thirty houses, roughly built of boards and roofed with thatch, were scattered at intervals on or near the borders of the Hudson, above and below the fort. Their inhabitants, about a hundred in number, were for the most part rude Dutch farmers, tenants of Van Rensselaer, the patroon, or lord of the manor. They raised ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... consideration. Mr. Holt constituted himself architect, and commenced operations by lashing a pole across two trees at about his own height; the others cut sticks and shrubs for roofing. Three young saplings sloped back to the ground as principal rafters, and on these were laid a thatch of brushwood; the open ends of the hut were filled ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... time to finish her polite objection, for the next moment she felt herself lifted in the air, smelled the bark thatch within an inch of her nose, saw the firelight vanish behind her, and subsiding into his curved arms as in a hammock, the two passed ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... uprights about 6 ft. from the ground. Often the ridge pole can be laid from one small tree to another. Avoid tall trees on account of lightning. Eight or ten long poles are then laid slanting against the ridge pole on each side. Cedar or hemlock boughs make the best thatch for the brush camp. They should be piled up to a thickness of a foot or more over the slanting poles and woven in and out to keep them from slipping. Then a number of poles should be laid over them to prevent them ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... night. The maple was indeed a robin's inn at some crossing of the invisible roads of the air. Its green dome towered high above and fell to the gable end of the little house. Its deep and leafy thatch hid every timber of its frame save the rough column. Its trunk was the main beam, each limb a corridor, each tier of limbs a floor, and branch rose above branch like steps in a stairway. Up and down ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... ran off, fetched their gods, and threw them on the temple floor. Then Ongoloo, seizing a brand from the fire, thrust it into the loose cocoa-nut fibre, and set the pile in a blaze. Quickly the flames leaped into the temple thatch, and set the whole structure on fire. As the fire roared and leaped, Waroonga, with Tomeo and Buttchee, started a hymn. It chanced to be one which Zeppa had already taught the people, who at once took it up, and sent forth such a shout of praise ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... lightning and serpent. It was armor and plume and banner to him. I thought of our own devices, comforting or discomforting kinships! He had black, lustrous hair, no beard—they pluck out all body hair save the head thatch—high features, a studied look of settled and cold fierceness. Such was ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... mists and mellow fruitfulness! Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... brilliant day through. Then the river; who could describe this lower reach of the Chagres as it curves its seven deep and placid miles from where Uncle Sam releases it from custody, to the ocean. Its jungled banks were without a break, for the one or two clusters of thatch and reed huts along the way are but a part of the living vegetation. Now and then we had glimpses across the tree-tops of brilliant green jungle hills further inland, everywhere were huge splendid trees, the stack-shaped ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... fit for a lord, but there's a small matter of the floor that is sunk and lets in the rats—bad cess to the dogs for an idle, useless pack. And there's the Count's room would do finely, but the vagabonds have never mended the thatch that was burned the last drinking, and though 'twas no more than the width of a flea's leap, the devil of a big bowl of water has it let in! The young master's friends are in the South, but the ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Multitudes of visitors from all parts of the world yearly visit this relic of Old Shanklin. Pretty thatched cottages can be seen in many parts of the Island, but nowhere is there such a combination, there being three different styles of roof in thatch, the setting in a background of trees completing the illusion of the country. In the angle where the figures stand is the rustic fountain on which hangs the shield with the verse written by the poet Longfellow when staying at Hollier's Hotel, ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... Inn, a many-gabled, mediaeval building, constructed almost entirely of timber, plaster, and thatch, stood close to the line of the roadside, almost opposite the churchyard, and was connected with a row of cottages on the left by thatched outbuildings. It was an uncommonly characteristic and handsome specimen of the genuine ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... a disreputable, drunken owl. His face was as bluish-red and puffed and seamed and cross-lined as the cheapest round steak of the butcher. His eyes were swollen slits; his nose a pickled beet; his hair would have made the wildest thatch of a Jack-in-the-box look like the satin poll of a Cleo de Merode. The rest of him was ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... between aira and arundo. This colossal gramen looks like the donax of Italy. This, the arundinaria of the Mississippi, (ludolfia, Willd., miegia of Persoon,) and the bamboos, are the highest gramens of the New Continent. Its seed has been carried to St. Domingo, where its stalk is employed to thatch the negroes' huts.) ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... lively meal: Roy, dropped from the clouds, the film of the East gone from his face, was simply Nevil again; even as young Cuthbert, with his large build and thatch of tawny hair, was a juvenile edition of Broome. And the older man, watching them, bandying chaff with them, renewed his youth ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... desperation, and sent flights of fire-arrows into the fort to burn the straw-thatched houses. The flames caught in many places; but with the help of the Indians they were extinguished, though several Frenchmen were wounded, and there was great fright for a time. But the thatch was soon stripped off and the roofs covered with deer and bear skins, while mops fastened to long poles, and two large wooden canoes filled with water, were made ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... punishment. But one thing I have not confessed. When I last went out from here, and passed by my master's farm, one thing and another boiled up in me, and I directly stroked a lucifer against the wall: it came a little too near the thatch, and everything was burnt—hot-headedness came over it, just as it comes over me, I helped to save the cattle and furniture. Nothing living was burnt, except a flock of pigeons: they flew into the flames, and the yard dog. I ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... in Anne's shoulder and cried stormily. Anne, in a sudden glad flash of understanding, held him tight and looked over his curly thatch ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... would turn white or potato color or something," said Lathrop, to whom Harry confided his expectation, "this red thatch of mine is a nuisance. At school I was always Brick-top or Red-Head and out here the natives all look at my carrot-colored top-knot as if they'd like to scalp me and keep it for ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton |
